531–540 of 721 posts
Shrinkflation has made me healthier. I just buy the basic ingredients and make everything myself now. Sad that every part of being a consumer any more feels like I'm being had. Costco is the only place that I feel is being straight with me.
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Even regional differences in things. If you say "one bar of butter", "one stick of butter", and "one pat of butter", these can all refer to three different things or the same thing, depending on where you are located. East Coast and West Coast US butter are sold in different size blocks (though both are "8 tbsp") however sometimes you'll find 4tbsp sticks on the west coast that look like 1/2 an East Coast stick that…
Here in the UK, there's a trend of selling 200g blocks for certain brands that ruin recipes. We have to be careful to avoid those and stick to the 250g ones. Yes, I know we could cut 50g of another block but then we'd need to measure, and we'd have an open brick to keep. It steals part of the joy of baking, forcing us to think instead of feel.
Though Betty Crocker also made cook books that did not rely on boxes. A recipe my parents used to make crepes came from a BC cook book. Another one was the Nestle tollhouse cookies that was listed on their bag of chocolate chips.
I'm always amazed that techniques like shrinkflation work (or I presume they work, because if they didn't I assume no one would be doing it!). Do the manufacturers just think that consumers won't eventually notice the reduced amount of product, leading to only short-term gains? Perhaps more people need to stop buying certain brands out of spite when they try and quietly shrink the packages.
Much to the chagrin of my mother, I made it a point about a decade ago to standardize old family recipes on "from scratch" versions. As part of the process, I also did some research on old recipes and fixed some of the corruption of these recipes that occurred during the copying and recitation, bolstering them with culinary techniques that were in use at the time. I also captured things that drift over time, such as…
I’ve also digitized some recipes and had to deal with “1 can” or “1 bar” without size included. Some things aren’t sold like that anymore or their size has fluctuated. In the example about it was for a candy bar pound cake and “1 can of Hershey’s syrup” isn’t a thing anymore that I can tell and even if it was, I had no clue the size. Same with “1 Hershey’s bar”, uhh, no clue what 1 standard bar was then. Thankfully m…
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Oh no they don't.
I’d say it’s probably more common they use mixes than they create from scratch from the limited experience and talks I’ve had with bakers on the subject. The professional part are the modifications, frosting, and decoration. Hard to beat the premade mixes for a base though.
The issues of boxes changing and dependency management, and this thread is rough analogy to coders who just glue prepackaged stuff together or overuse of packages.
I don’t know if there’s any real takeaway but I had never thought of programming problems in this way — things always felt a bit more abstract than cooking is.
Leavener example might be genuine tweak because they thought it would be better but it could easily be cheapening of ingredients which is a problem with premade mixes too. The box might be the same volume but i'd expect most mixes wouldn't taste the same these days either. Any mix with chocolate in particular has had the cocoa quantity + quality reduced to the point I can often barely taste it because it's such a com…
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> Same with “1 Hershey’s bar”, uhh, no clue what 1 standard bar was then. Thankfully my mom was able to fill in the gaps but let this be a lesson, if you have family recipes you love, get it written down with actual units, you’ll thank yourself later. This will break in other ways; the makeup of a candy bar changes over time as ingredients rise and fall in price.
Also, Hershey's "chocolate" tastes of vomit due to butyric acid from lipolysis
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For casual bakers, exact precision using grams can help... Or it might not matter at all. You'd need to have everything else be as precise for it to matter. Are you weighing your eggs? Do you adjust based on the humidity of the air? Do you know all of the hot spots in your oven and is the thermometer accurate? It's science, but ya gotta realize you arent baking a sphere in a vacuum ya know? At least a gram is a gram…
> Are you weighing your eggs? Yes, always. I don't know what its like where you are, but where I am you can get eggs either in mixed packets, or sorted by size. So where I am, 1 egg != 1 egg unless you weigh it. It doesn't matter for soufflé's or meringues. But for everything else you'll have problems if you use random sized eggs. > Do you adjust based on the humidity of the air? Absorption capability of flour tends…
Much to the chagrin of my mother, I made it a point about a decade ago to standardize old family recipes on "from scratch" versions. As part of the process, I also did some research on old recipes and fixed some of the corruption of these recipes that occurred during the copying and recitation, bolstering them with culinary techniques that were in use at the time. I also captured things that drift over time, such as…
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